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In the backdrop of glowing tributes being paid to President Mahinda Rajapaksa these days on the achievements of the past four years of the Presidency, the President accepted yet another symbol of his achievements.

This was when he accepted trophies of two World Summit Awards that were presented to him last week. The awards were won by Sri Lanka for the two world best e-content projects at a prestigious international competition in 2009. They were presented to the President at a simple ceremony held at Temple Trees recently.

Sri Lanka was feted at the “World Summit Award (WSA) 09 Winners’ Gala, WSA Winners’ Conference and Exhibition” and was presented with the awards in Monterrey, Mexico recently. Two of Sri Lanka’s Information and Communication Technology of Sri Lanka (ICTA) initiated projects that won the best e-Content awards under two different categories were “1919” or the “GIC” project and  project “Impaired Aid.”.

The WSA award event in Mexico was organised in collaboration with the UN GAID’s Global Forum.

The President thanked ICTA for the hard work it had done towards the winning these two world awards which underlined the progress it had helped to achieve under the e-Sri Lanka initiative in the past four to five years. The President offered a bouquet of plaudits to ICTA for being the initiator and guide in contributing to Sri Lanka winning two world awards outrunning 20,000 other products/ projects submitted initially by 157 countries participating in the 4th edition of WSA.  Indeed ICTA should be commended for these two WSA awards of this year”, the President said.

Speaking    on the occasion of the presentation of the WSA trophies, Rajapaksa said that he was pleased to receive these trophies which were two of the many manifestations that indicated that the benefits of ICT were reaching a wide spectrum of the people of Sri Lanka, including the most disadvantaged and those in the remotest village.

Referring to the awards as a twofold symbol of achievement of work done under the e-Sri Lanka initiative, the President thanked ICTA for much of the “behind-the-scenes” work that had led to making people’s lives more comfortable.

Moving on to elaborate on  the two world-award-winning projects that belong respectively to the ‘e-Government and Institutions’ and ‘e-Inclusion and Participation’ categories, the President said that  GIC  (Government Information Centre),  popularly known as the “1919” project has proved to be a blessing to the people even in the remotest part of the country  owing to the many benefits it offered including the opportunity  to find out the services they could get done by any Government Institution, even if the query was made  on a public holiday or in Sinhala, Tamil or English.

The President said that similarly the other project that had won the world award, namely the “Impaired Aid” project has gone a long way in making the aurally impaired person to be on par with the rest of the people. This will help a lot in the Sri Lankan society’s effort to be an inclusive and participatory people without any discrimination on the basis of whether one is differently able or has other differences.

President Secretary Lalith Weeratunga, ICTA Chairman Prof. P. W. Epasinghe,  Chief Operating Officer Reshan Dewapura, Programme Director Jayantha Fernando  and Senior Programme Head and Strategic Communications Athula Pushpakumara were among the members of the team that presented the awards to the President.